The sun is beating
down hard on the surface of the bright, smooth Jerusalem stone. The single word
carved into the rock hits me like a bolt of lightning: “Kisvarda”.

I slowly close my
eyes and then take a second look: am I seeing this right? I am in Jerusalem in
the very heart of the Holy Land, on the hallowed grounds of Yad Vashem. The
signpost at the intersection helps: “Valley of the destroyed communities”. In
front of us lays the biggest cemetery on earth that holds the restless souls of
six million murdered human beings.

The word carved
into the stone pierces my heart like a blade.
Kisvarda. Once upon a time home of my ancestors since 1747. Today it is a
bustling little metropolis, resembling an over-packed hornet’s nest, a re-born
Phoenix rising from the ashes of a troubled history. But something is missing.
Something, that was part and parcel of the local population for a hundred and
ninety seven years. My relatives. My community. The Jews.

Today, there is no
one left. The Jewish cemetery is no longer expecting new occupants. The last
Jew of Kisvarda was laid to rest in this orphaned, overgrown, neglected garden
of eternity some years ago.

Our still
magnificent synagogue, a masterpiece of Moorish architecture, once the
throbbing heart of our vibrant and colorful community today serves as a
haphazard and terribly neglected regional museum overseen by a drunken
Hungarian custodian who has no idea about what this imposing edifice once
represented to a living community. It is heart-breaking to see how the orphaned
building just stands there today in its awe-inspiring former glory, like a
bride frozen in the ice-tomb of an unforeseen catastrophe, still dressed in her
best, waiting for her chosen who will never return.

Only the wondering,
restless, silently crying souls reside behind its stained windows. The souls of
all those, whose tortured bodies were taken away from our world by the trains
of hatred on Monday, May 29, 1944. The last train from the Ghetto. The entire
families of my Father and Mother among them. Every single person who would have
meant anything to me. My aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, their rabbis,
teachers, doctors, grocers and shoemakers. My entire incinerated Universe.

Today I am standing
on the hills of Jerusalem, but in the eyes of my soul I am watching with
indescribable horror and utter helplessness the loading of the filthy cattle
cars with their precious human cargo. Next to the brickyard a handful of
over-zealous Hungarian gendarmes in their impeccable, shiny uniforms are
enthusiastically clubbing entire families into the over-packed cattle cars. The
butt of a rifle hits hard. Bones are breaking, but in the mad hell of it all
there is no time for cries. The faces, the eyes the tears, the prayers and the
cries will be forever carved into my heart.

My paternal
Grandfather, Avraham Yitzhak Eichler was sixty-nine years old at the time. His
wife Anna Gerendasi was fifty-five. All my father’s siblings, Vilmos (44), Hugo
(43), Margit (35), Olga (25) together with the siblings of my grandfather,
Samuel, Henrik, Jeno, Odon and Gizella. My maternal grandmother Ilona Berger
and her sister Szerena together with her fourteen children were transformed
into smoke and ashes within thirty minutes of arriving at Auschwitz. My Uncle
Willie and his wife Bella with their two
children, one six years old, the other barely four were sent straight into the
gas chambers.

Many years later an
eyewitness who survived told me, that when the numbered, beaten and starved
human cargo of the cattlecars was delivered to the selection platform of the
death factory, an elegantly dressed SS doctor was standing on the embankment.
Constantly smiling, he casually pointed to the left and to the right with his
soft kid gloves.

The Angel of Death.
Dr. Mengele. My gap-toothed, handsome, well-dressed constant companion in my
nightmares ever since I can remember. For I was there too. When that monster
selected my Mother to serve as his human guinea pig, he selected me for life
too. A cursed burden, that is crushing to live with every day of my life.

My Aunt Olga, who
managed to hold on to her beautiful twins, was the first one on the road to the
gas chamber. She walked, with her head erect, one child on her arm, the other
walking beside her, holding hands on the road of no return.

Back at the loading
dock, an unfortunate Jew from our town who was weakened by the arduous three
day ride in the suffocating cattle cars was moving slower than the others. A
huge SS soldier took a swing at him with the butt of his rifle, scattering his
brain all over the pavement.

My uncle Willie
Eichler who was just a moment earlier standing next to the man who was so
savagely slain, suddenly bolted out of the lineup and with his bare dealing a
single, powerful blow, knocked the SS butcher dead.

My uncle then one
last time looked at his wife who was still holding on to their beautiful twins
on her arms, knowing what faith was awaiting all of them, he calmly walked over
to the electrified fence and threw himself on the high-voltage barbed wire.

My maternal
grandmother, Ilona Berger was fifty-five years old. She was driven into the gas
chamber among the very first of the new arrivals. Her husband, my grandfather
Vilmos Frank was also fifty-five at the time. (He was somewhat luckier than the
rest of my family, since he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery in World
War I. when he served in the Astro-Hungarian army of Emperor Franz Josef. As a
reward for his heroism, he was “only” sent to the Therezienstadt camp, which
was a model camp to fool the Red Cross inspectors).

My Father Kalman
fared somewhat better, he and his 23 year old twin brother Gabriel (after whom
I was named) were sent to perform back-braking slave labor with their other
brothers Samuel (36), Ernest (33) and Joseph (32). They were driven onto the
Russian minefields by their Hungarian Nazi captors as human detonators. Only
the twins survived the horrors of the eastern front. All other members of my
family had perished in the furious inferno of Nazi hatred.

Why am I mentioning
them by name? So that future generations should know that they existed. They have
no tombstone. They have no resting-place.

But they lived.
They were people. They were feeling human beings. They rejoiced. They were sad.
They worked. They celebrated. They were part of the colorful mosaic that was
the world of Kisvarda and vicinity, tucked away in the idyllic, quiet and
simple country life that was pre-World War II Eastern Europe.

Recently I returned
to my birthplace, one last time. There I stood, facing the gates of my
Grandfather’s home. The lion’s head with the knocker was long gone, but the old
garden was intact. The fruit- laden trees planted once upon a time by my
grandparents were still there.

Standing there in
silence, I took out my camera to take some photographs of the house, when the
door opened and this old man
in his eighties, wearing the garb of a prosperous Hungarian peasant appeared.
First he looked me over and then he turned to me with a traditional Hungarian
greeting: ”May God give you a good day, Sir!”

He then asked me
why I was taking pictures of his house. When I told him, that it used to be the
home of my deported grandparents he grew visibly agitated and worried,
apparently fearing, that I came to re-claim the house the land and the business
that he had taken from my murdered family.

When I reassured
him, that I was only there to simply take a few pictures for my children, he
became somewhat friendlier and suddenly he told me: “you know, we were all
feeling really bad at first when your loved ones were being taken away for the
gas chambers.” Ten, adjusting his handlebar mustache he added: “you know
we knew that they were all turned into soap and lampshades”.

Then, volunteering
some more sympathy for my loss he added: "I think you should know that,
your grandparents were exceptionally good folks, although they were Jewish….”

I am sure he must
have meant this as a compliment, but it was a painful reminder to me, that
precious little has changed in these parts in the past fifty-some years.

Right there and
then this wave of emotion flooded me: something must be done to make sure, that
the memories of my ancestors’ shtetl should not disappear without a trace
behind the trapdoors of the bottomless pit that is History.

For the very few of
us who by the grace of fate have survived from the inferno of our apportioned
destiny, it is our sacred mission to not only remember but also to remind those
that will follow in our footsteps of what was done to us.

The few of us who
remain, think of our vanished past with painful nostalgia, of the abandoned, robbed,
gutted home, the orphaned synagogue, and the Jewish schools that will no longer
be rebuilt. There will be no more Jewish weddings in Kisvarda, and the echoes
of laughter of the once vibrant Jewish community center are now blown away by
the merciless winds of time.

But the faces
remain. They haunt me in my dreams. And yes, I do recognize them all in an
instant, because their imprint is burned forever in my broken soul. Inside me
they will live on forever. The timeless powers of eternity engraved their
un-earesable images in every part of my being.

I am now the keeper
of this precious treasure, not by choice but by fateful circumstance.

The basic premise
to the survival of the Jews as a people is the task assigned by the Almighty:
“”….and tell your sons…” Tell them about the life you had. Tell them about your
town, your community- places, they will never see.

And frankly, they
don’t miss it, only we do, the chosen keepers of the eternal flame. For only we
know, that we left a lot more behind then mere houses and gardens. What we left
behind were our nurturing roots, our torn-away loves, our evaporated dreams,
and our never-happened youth with all those years that were full of promise. It
is where we left behind nearly all of our beliefs in humanity and all of our
faith.

But we must tell
our children, and to our children’s children that even in this drastically
changing world around us, we can find our rightful places. If only we can carry
on with that homegrown, old-fashioned and time-tested value system handed down
to us by those, taken from us by the flames of hatred. We will live.

With our very
being, every day, every hour and every minute we must raise an eternal memorial
to the gigantic cultural heritage. To those orphaned places of worship, the
dismembered burned Torah scrolls, the prayer books that were ripped apart, in
which once upon a time shaking hands marked the dates of joy and of solemn
remembrances of yesteryears.

We are messengers
with an awesome mission. We must remind the coming generations, that those
names carved into memorial plaques were real people. Lives. Hopes. Neighbors.
Friends. Us.

The sunshine of
Jerusalem sharply reflects from the surface of the letters carved into the
stone.”Kisvarda”. I close my eyes. “Kisvarda”. It is such a small dot on the
map of the world, that it is impossible to find it any more. But it is so
gigantic on the maps of our hearts, that it can never be forgotten.

Wherever I am, in
New York, Jerusalem or Alaska, all I have to do is simply close my eyes and I
am instantly transported back to the world that once was.

I can see Main
Street with it’s glittering shops, an Eastern-European shtetl version of
today’s Madison Avenue: the millinery shop of old Mr. Kastner, the cigar stand
of the one-legged Leslie Fischer, the always over stuffed delicatessen of Andor
Klein, the fine art framing shop of Samuel Eichler, the hiking and bicycle shop
of Paul Schwartz and Nicholas Geiger, the fine watch shop of the Eimer family,
the glittering crystal shop of the Teichmanns, the spectacular shoe store of
the Reismanns, the Biedermann and Kovacs supermarket, the instant printing shop
of Preiss publishers, the Frenkl family’s perfume boutique.

And look! Around
the corner on display are the freshly made chocolate delicacies of the
Stuhmers, next to the Vadasz gift boutique and the custom-made shoe salon of
the Preraus. Next door is the Schwartz family’s soft-drink stand, the Kellner
and Klein department store.

You see, there once
was a world here. Our world. A world full of life of joy of hope of future.
What remains today is an enormous void. They are all gone. Their lives snuffed
out irrevocably. Our once brightly shining Menorah, symbol of a rich Jewish
life stands inverted, nearly buried, its lights irrevocably suffocated by the
sands of time.

As a young
journalist, back in 1973 shortly after the Yom Kippur war I had a chance to
meet the late Golda Meir. She was a wise woman who possessed a tremendous sense
of destiny. She spoke with the unquestionable authority of a person destined to
be a leader, but always with an ever-present sadness in her voice.

She told me
something that will reverberate in my soul until my dying day: “Son, the world
is sick and tired with hearing about us Jews. For them the Six Million is a
number, a statistic. They don’t seem to understand that for us, the real
tragedy is not just the loss of our Six Million. But it is the generations that
will not happen after them…”

I often think of
what Golda said back then. Frankly until then I wasn’t thinking in those terms.
But ever since….

Recently she came
to my mind in the middle of a festive dinner in New York City, benefiting the
venerable Weizmann Institute of Science. There at the head table, forty-four
people were seated. They all had three things in common: they were all Jewish,
they were all involved with some kind of research at the Weizmann- and all of
them were Nobel Laureates in something.

It was a truly
awesome sight. I thought to myself: Look what we have given to the world in
brainpower, knowledge and goodness! I was pondering: probably no other
nationality, creed, race or religion is represented in such disproportionately
high numbers among these extraordinary gifts to the world. We are a special
people!

And then I thought
of the last frame of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”. There was a two-liner on
the screen that said: “Of the 1,100 human being Oscar Schindler saved, there
are 6,700 descendants alive today.” And then I thought of Kisvarda. And then of
what Golda said. Using the same equation I then came to the conclusion, that in
the flames of the Shoah, we actually lost about thirty six million of our
people.

I am forever
haunted by the “what if” questions: how many potential Einsteins? What could
have been? How many possible Nobel Laureates? Teachers. Poets. Inventors.
Doctors. Researchers. We will never know….

And you know it is
not just a Jewish loss, it is the world’s loss too….

The sun is beating
down hard on the surface of the bright, smooth Jerusalem stone. The single word
carved into the rock hits me like a bolt of lightning: “Kisvarda”.

I slowly close my
eyes and then take a second look: am I seeing this right? I am in Jerusalem in
the very heart of the Holy Land, on the hallowed grounds of Yad Vashem. The
signpost at the intersection helps: “Valley of the destroyed communities”. In
front of us lays the biggest cemetery on earth that holds the restless souls of
six million murdered human beings.

The word carved
into the stone pierces my heart like a blade.
Kisvarda. Once upon a time home of my ancestors since 1747. Today it is a
bustling metropolis, resembling an over-packed hornet’s nest, a re-born Phoenix
rising from the ashes of a troubled history. But something is missing.
Something, that was part and parcel of the local population for a hundred and
ninety seven years. My relatives. My community. The Jews.

Where am I? In the
shtetl or in Jerusalem? I am where the Jew always is.

Wondering. Always
on the way somewhere, nobody really knows where. Always moving along with the
winds of time. When will this Diaspora end? Will it ever? Ours is a journey of
many
Millennia. Are we on a ship that constantly sails the oceans of ages, but never
puts into port?

The warm Jerusalem
breeze gently caresses my face. I am among my own now. I am at home. In the
Hall of Remembrance. I turn my eyes skyward and slowly utter the hallowed words
of the ancient prayer for the dead: “Yisgadal veyiskadash sh’meh rabbah…”

-30-

Dedicated to my
Family.

Compiled by Peter Spiro

If you have additional
information or old photographs to contribute, please send them to me at the
address below.

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